She also made a daring switch-up with her stylist. While Mamdani and Duwaji worked with Jill Biden’s former stylist, Bailey Moon, for their victory party ensembles in November, on Thursday they turned to Karefa-Johnson (notably, a onetime colleague of Mamdani senior advisor Zara Rahim, who had brokered the connection, Karefa-Johnson wrote Substack). Known for her outspokenness about the failures of the fashion industry and about the Israel–Hamas war, Karefa-Johnson is at once a fashion insider, who attends fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, and a frequent critic.
She walks the sort of tightrope that Duwaji may need to walk. Asked about the decision to work with Karefa-Johnson, a Mamdani spokesperson said, “What distinguishes her is her moral clarity. She rejects the idea that fashion should be neutral, hollow, or detached from the world it moves through. Her work insists that clothing carries values, history, and culture, and rejects the comfort of sitting out.
